I was watching a twitch streamer play the game pogostuck (A game similar in frustration and difficulty to Getting over it with Bennett Foddy — Don’t Fall!).

They were also reading chat at the same time (usually out loud, as well). Multitasking.

Lots of sources (here’s one) say that true multitasking is impossible. Rather, it’s very fast switching, where there is a degradation of performance.

Knowing this, I naturally made it my mission to trip the streamer up with seemingly benign messages.

I was sharing some actual information about another streamer who beat another game, but a made a typo something like:

I remember a streamer beat the game a game …

And I noticed how much more the streamer struggled to read this compared to previous, accidental typos (missing spaces, extra spaces, etc.). He spent a good 5 seconds on this message, and during the process, he fell really far. 😈

So I decided to do some testing. Inserting words, swapping them around, and whatnot, to see what tripped him up the most. Most typos didn’t affect him.

There was one typo that tripped him again, where I said something like:

If it wasn’t for a for

So it seems to be repetition? But I couldn’t always replicate this with other forms of repetition.

Later on, I copied the two guards riddle, with an alteration:

One of the guards always lies and the other always lies as wekk. You don’t know which one is the truth-teller or the liar either. However both guards know each other

Sadly, I didn’t cut the part about “don’t know which is truth teller or liar” out.

The streamer spent a good 5 minutes interpreting this puzzle, and eventually interpreting it as the original puzzle. Then, he was trying to solve a riddle, game, and read chat all at once.

He was stuck on the bottom until he gave up on the riddle (I revealed that I meant what I said when I said both guards lie). 😈

Anyway, that was a bit off topic but still relevant.

I’m wondering if any studies have been done on this? I know studies have been done on human’s ability to read words with the letters partially scrambled, but what about typos?

How can I improve my distraction game (with plausible deniability of course)?